The Orange Tree's choice to open its forthcoming season of Shaw with a rarely-performed play by Harley Granville-Barker is an interesting one.

The theatre has a close association with the playwright, having premiered his final two plays, while Barker's earlier piece, The Voysey Inheritance, is enjoying a successful run at the National Theatre.

But The Madras House, which Barker wrote in 1910, was last revived as long ago as 1992 in a Barker retrospective at the Edinburgh Festival and is known as fiendishly difficult to bring to the stage.

Perhaps it's the scope. Action moves between the family home of the Huxtables and their six trapped and unmarried daughters, and the drapery emporium of the title, a different kind of prison for its 'live-in' workers and models. In the process, characters debate such issues as marriage, infidelity, coeducation and fashion. But this is no flimsy copy of Cosmopolitan.

"It's a comparison of what freedom for women actually means," explains Jacqueline King, who plays Mrs Huxtable in the first act and a stronger character later in the play.

"Is it working, as the girls at the fashion house do? Or is it what the daughters have? They may be rich but it's an enclosed life for them unless they get married.

"Barker deliberately makes it ambigious. You are not sure if Mrs Huxtable is delighted to have her daughters at home or frustrated by them. It's left to the audience's opinion."

A life spent waiting for Mr Right or the daily humiliation of parading fashions to the idle rich - the themes sound worryingly familiar, despite the antiquated setting. But does King count her blessings to be living in 2006, not a hundred years before?

"You betcha!" says the actress. "I've always thought I'm lucky to live when I did - growing up with the freedoms of the swinging 60s. "I absolutely respect the work that was done by the suffragettes and women's lib."

King returns to the Orange Tree after a role in last season's Larkin with Women but will probably be most familiar from her stint as Georgina in two series of the TV cop drama, Fifty Five Degrees North.

Strange then, that she cites television as the reason why plays like The Madras House are so rarely produced.

"Watching as much television as we do, we've got used to a very easy tale," she says.

"What we're not used to is in-depth argument, the intellectual debate. In general people like a beginning, a middle, and an end - with lots of eye-catching candy along the way.

"This play is not that - it doesn't necessarily have its beginning, middle and end. But I can guarantee that people will come away discussing the issues."

  • The Madras House, Orange Tree Theatre, 1 Clarence Street, Richmond, Wednesday, September 6 to Saturday, October 14, £7-£17, call 020 8940 3633, visit orangetree.co.uk for times and details.